It's airing again here in the UK. We're three episodes in so far, and MY GOD, it just makes me so angry.
Seriously, how ignorant are these people? Did I seriously just hear someone who SUPPOSEDLY knows about nutrition and food say "Yeah, the fries count as the vegetable" after turning down a perfectly healthy chicken and vegetables noodle dish for "not having enough vegetables" in it?
And of course it's all Jamie's fault for "trying to change everything", not their fault for having brainwashed their kids into only wanting to eat food that essentially isn't food and will kill them.
Has anyone else watched this show? And been completely horrified by what these people are so happy to eat, and to vigilantly defend eating as if there's nothing wrong with it?
I watched a couple episodes. It was pretty sad. One episode he was talking about what was in chicken nuggets and showed the kids all the additives and such, ground it up in food processor and fried it up and asked the little kids "who would eat this?" and they all raised their hands. He was astounded.
But you have to remember some of the areas he's going to are very poor. They don't have the money to have real food. It costs a lot more to be eat healthy and if you're on food stamps trying to feed a family of 4 or more fresh fruits and vegetables are a luxury. Some of these children will go to bed hungry at times.
I get angry that we still this type of poverty. But that's my little soapbox.
If it's what you've eaten all your life it's difficult to change attitudes and taste buds. Your parents and maybe even grandparents ate this way also-probably since the what? 1960's or so?
My parents talk about when they were young how they had to go out and pick weeds for food-(haven't had the heart to tell Mom that dandelion greens are a really good source of vit C and I'm paying for them at the store now.) And how when money was scarce, how they'd mix up flour, water and egg, fry the balls in lard just to have something to feed the kids and tell them it was meatballs. Forutnately I came along a whole lot later after the money situtation got much better.
Plus you get an outsider "coming in telling us we're all wrong"
Not that I agree-I'm channeling some of my family from those type of areas. So basically I stopped watching it because I'd get angry at the situation, how they treated Jamie, how he couldn't get people to understand he wasn't attacking them, he was trying to improve their health.
Yeah, I reckon the fact that he was an "outsider" had them immediately suspicious and behaving horribly towards him. Which isn't his fault either, just goes to show I guess. A lot of the people in that town came across as exceedingly closed minded and stubborn. Whether they're actually like that or not, I don't know.
The saddest part for me was the teenage boy whose house Jamie went to, and found that his mum stocked the fridge with frozen pizzas and all other kinds of crap. He gave them a menu to help them eat healthily, came back, and nothing had been done. They'd been eating pizza all week. I felt sorry for the kids more than angry at the parents to be honest.
Here, vegetables and fruit aren't THAT expensive. Some fast food and stuff may be cheaper, but at markets you can buy, say, a big box of strawberries for £1. That may be different in America, I don't know. But here, eating healthily is NOT expensive so long as you actually know what you're doing.
Jamie did say he'd seen kids in South African shanty towns eating better healthier food though...
Something's not right if one of the richest countries in the world feels it can justify feeding little kids pizza and chocolate milk for breakfast because of financial reasons. There should be no excuse for that.
I have seen the show and you are right, the people on it are soooo frustrating! Jamie is awesome though, I have a lot of respect for him considering the amount of crap he gets.
I watched this show when it was on here in the US and the way some of the people treated him horrified me! I also got the impression that some of the people in that town didn't like the idea of being criticized and told what to do by someone who wasn't from that town. The show probably doesn't give a full and accurate depiction of the entire town's attitudes, but, from what is shown, it did seem like the hostility was rare. It seemed to be more that many people were just extremely set in their ways.
It's understandable that we do have such a problem with food here in America. While we are the "fattest" major country in the world and have the largest food supply in the world, we also spend the smallest percentage of our income on food of any other country in the world. The problem is that we have such an abundance of unhealthy food here, which is soooo incredibly cheap when compared to healthy food, which can be expensive, especially when you're buying for a family. In most countries, this is not the case. Here in Chicago, I could buy 10 packages of Ramen noodles (which would be about $1) for less than a single head of lettuce. This also explains why America is one of the only countries in the world where poor people also tend to be obese.
Jamie's American Food Revolution
